Mainstem and Systemwide draft recommendations

May 5, 2006

The Mainstem Review Team (MSRT) completed an initial review (860k PDF) of all the proposals on April 18. The results will serve as a basis for the Council staff's development of recommendations for Council consideration. Each proposal was placed in one or more of the categories identified in the Program Priorities (Appendix 1) and then tied to the monitoring components or focal research themes provided with the Monitoring and Evaluation Questions and Research Critical Uncertainties (Appendix 2a and 2b). This categorization will help organize the recommendations and identify what Program level priorities are covered with the existing proposals.

The MSRT review focused its review on management priority, as the ISRP will be relied upon to provide a review of the scientific soundness of the proposals. Project sponsors were notified of the time their projects were reviewed and asked to be available by phone in case questions arose concerning their proposals. The initial MSRT review functioned as a cursory sorting of proposals into prioritization categories and issues. Further review and analysis will be required to develop funding recommendations.

A total of 161 proposals were reviewed. The proposals were prioritized into four categories:

1. 28 projects were placed in the Core Program category ($41M)
2. 32 were placed in the High Priority category ($20M)
3. 55 were placed in the Recommended Action category ($17M), and
4. 21 were ranked as Do Not Fund ($2.9M).

Ten on-the-ground projects were deemed better suited to a local review and were not prioritized by the MSRT ($2.7M). In addition, several groups of projects were not given a final ranking, pending a review in special categories (i.e., fish passage monitoring, database management, and fish and wildlife manager coordination). All but two multi-province projects were provided a review by the MSRT and incorporated in the Program framework.

It is anticipated that the MSRT review group will reconvene to reconcile the outstanding issues over the course of the next several months.

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